Exam Questions
The subject and aims of theoretical grammar as opposed to practical grammar. #Theoretical grammar as a branch of linguistics. Grammar and other branches, their interrelations. #Word as a main unit of morphology. Lexical and grammatical aspects of the word. Types of grammatical meanings. #The historic development of English grammatical studies. #The grammatical structure of the English language. #Systemic relations in language. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. #Morphology and syntax as two main parts of grammar. #Language as a system and structure. Language levels. Linguistic units and their peculiarities. #Grammatical (morphological) categories. The notion of opposition as the basis of grammatical categories. Oppositional analysis. Types of oppositions. #Grammatical categories in communication. Reduction of grammatical opposition. #Parts of speech. Different approaches to the classification of parts of speech. #Criteria for establishing parts of speech: semantic, formal and functional. Notional and functional parts of speech. #The noun as a part of speech. Morphological, semantic and syntactic properties of the noun. #Grammatically relevant classes of nouns. #The category of number. Formal and functional features of the number category. The problem of number in different subclasses of nouns. #The category of case. The evolution of theoretical interpretations of the category of case in English. #The category of noun determination: oppositional and situational approaches. The linguistic status of article. The problem of the zero article. #The verb as a part of speech. Grammatically relevant subclasses of verbs (transitive/intransitive, terminative/nonterminative). #Syntagmatic properties of verbs: valency, combinability, adjunct, complement, supplement. #Finite and non-finite forms of the verb. The category of finitude. Grammatical status of verbids, their grammatical categories and syntactic complexes. #The verbal categories of person and number. #The category of tense in English. Tense oppositions. Absolute and relative tense meanings of English tense-forms. #The category of aspect. Aspect opposition in English. Lexical aspect in English and its difference from its Russian counterpart. #The nature of Perfect forms. Opposition within this category, its name and realization in finite and non-finite forms. #The category of voice. Voice opposition. The number of voices in English. Peculiarities of English Passive voice as compared with Russian. #The category of mood. The problem of mood opposition. Mood and modality. #The problem of the number of the Subjunctive Moods, their forms and uses. #General description of the adjective as a part of speech. Subclasses of the adjective and their relation to the category of comparison. #Grammatical category of comparison: controversy over types and number of forms; the elative comparison #Prepositions and conjunctions as parts of speech and their semantic types. #Function words in Modern English. #Syntax as a part of grammar. Kinds of syntactic theories. #Modern approaches to the language study: textlinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis. #Basic syntactic notions: syntactic units, syntactic relations, syntactic connections. #General characteristics of the word-group. #Nominal word combinations. Noun-phrases with pre-posed and post-posed adjuncts. #Verbal word combinations. Types of verbal complements. #Predication. Primary and secondary predication. Predicative word combinations. #The sentence. Structural and semantic characteristics of the sentence. Different approaches to the study of the sentence. #Sentence - proposition - utterance - speech act. #The structural types of sentences. #The simple sentence. Principal, secondary and detached parts of the sentence. #The paradigm of a simple sentence. Kernel and derived sentences. #The utterance. Informative structure of the utterance. The theme and the rheme. #The utterance. Communicative and pragmatic types of utterances. #The complex sentence as a polypredicative construction. Types of subordinate clauses. #Text as a syntactic unit. Coherence, cohesion and deixis as the main features of the text.